Midrarid dynasty

بنو مدرار

757 CE · 140 AH† – 976 CE · 365 AH† †

† Hijri date derived by computation from the Gregorian/Julian date; it may differ from the transmitted date by a day or two.

Draft card for the Midrarids, the Berber house that ruled Sijilmasa from the eighth to the tenth century; its sources are not yet checked on the page.

Depth

At a glance

Era
The Early Abbasid Caliphate
Region
Maghreb
Identifiers
Wikidata
Review
Draft Completeness 3/5 · Help complete it

In time

70075080085090095010001050
The Early Abbasid Caliphate · Abbasid Fragmentation · The Buyid, Fatimid and Seljuk Era · The Umayyad Period

Summary

The Banū Midrār were a Miknāsa Berber line that ruled Sijilmāsa at the end of the second Islamic century; Ibn Khaldun makes Midrār their founder, notes that he was a Ṣufrī Ibāḍī, and says their dominion in Sijilmāsa reached its height in his era 1.

Rule, building and intermarriage

Ibn Khaldun records that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Rustam, master of Tāhart, managed the affairs of the young Midrār through his daughter Urwā, who became the grandmother of their princes — a marriage alliance joining the two Ibāḍī states — and that al-Muʿtazz b. Muḥammad b. Midrār later took sole power: "it was he who finished its building and erecting, and laid out its factories and palaces," dying in 221 1. He then lists his successors Abū l-Muntaṣir Muḥammad and Midrār, surnamed Abū l-ʿĀfiya, until the crisis of Abū Yazīd and what followed 2.

For young visitors

The Banu Midrar were a family that ruled the desert city of Sijilmasa in Morocco; they allied with their neighbours at Tahart and built up a great town.

Research notes

  • Text from the harvested Ibar of Ibn Khaldun (Heliopolis 1957): pp. 1619–1621 (the Miknāsa clans and the state of the Banū Midrār). The house is named "Banū Midrār" in the text; its kinship with the Banū Rustam is documented in the same section. The other source filed on the card (Yaʿqūt's Muʿjam al-Buldān) has not yielded an entry for the dynasty — the locally extracted Yaqut volumes do not reach letter sīn — so the source stays on the card without prose drawn from it.

Sources

  1. Kitab al-Ibar of Ibn Khaldun , p.1620
  2. Kitab al-Ibar of Ibn Khaldun , p.1621
  • Muʼjam al-Buldan — Yaqut
Cite this page

islam.museum contributors. “Midrarid dynasty”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/polity/midrarid-dynasty/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-27.

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